But it’s easy to forget how important the format – the size, pagination and binding – is in all of this.

Sometimes the format and content are unconnected, with the former dictated purely by the most efficient use of paper and mailing. For the most part, we think that’s a less-than-great thing. That said, it can work very well for news-driven publications, where the words, navigation and visual identity are the most important thing, hands-down.

And it doesn’t seem remotely controversial to say that for highly visual, photography-rich work, a larger format works best, giving those images plenty of space to breathe and make the impact they were created for. These can get tricky when they get too large, but up to a certain size, bigger can often be better.

But what about truly compact formats? We’ve all seen the handbag editions of well-known consumer magazines. Some love them, some don’t. Personally, I find it’s too much content packed into too small a space. Maybe this is symptomatic of the content being conceived for a larger format, and then compressed down unnaturally.

But where the content is commissioned for the compact format, it gets really interesting. For example, we’re fans of the re-designed Readers Digest, which offers clarity, ease of navigation and lots of good content.

Furthermore, small formats can be perfect for certain subjects. We’ve found this with the latest edition of PetPeople, the newly reformatted magazine that we publish for pet insurer Petplan. The small format allows you to tell stories in a different way. It opens up room for a larger number of smaller, shorter stories – so you can have more threads of interest to pull in readers. And with social media increasingly driving attention online, that’s becoming increasingly important.

And above all, for a magazine about pets, it’s a cute format. Not many magazines in the financial services sector can say that.

This had a wonderfully evocative sensory weight. You can imagine the scene: the terrace of an old Cassis farmhouse, an ancient oak table groaning under the weight of a delicious terroir spread, the sun shining through a vine-covered pergola… A cliché and totally untrue.

Someone else suggested simply, ‘Sunday – when you’re at your best.’ Nice, but again not true.

A mate of mine, exasperated by the name, suggested it might be because we were naturally lazy. He felt that we should have called ourselves ‘Duvet Day’ or ‘Sickie’. Not true either – we’re actually a hard-working bunch, and retrofitting a better answer wasn’t really us…

This has been asked on and off for five years by those kind enough to feign interest (or simply struggling to keep the conversation going). So I thought I’d tell you why, in a meandering, circumlocutionary kind of a way, one that people who know me will recognise.

Firstly, it’s not because we’re an evangelical publishing business – not that we have a problem with religion, you understand, we’re just not a devotional organisation (except to our clients). Mind you, 1980s TV evangelism looked quite a good business… Anyway. Secondly, it has nothing to do with Nicole Kidman. Go on – you’ll have to Google it now.

Just after we launched, I met up with a guy I knew from junior school, who’s now a very big marketing fish at E.ON. When I told him what our new agency was called, he exclaimed, ‘Sundae – that’s a great name!’

I was gutted. Sundae was indeed a great name. Better than Sunday, I still think…

The current Sunday Publishing favourites, well worth checking out, are:

1. Ken Robinson on education – a brilliant analysis of how Western education systems fail to nurture creativity
2. Rory Sutherland on advertising – the most incisive and wittiest ad man in the UK
3. Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell on choice and happiness – as illustrated by spaghetti sauce
4. Hans Rosling on how unlocking data challenges our assumptions on the developing world
5. And finally, because he’s my old boss and a genius presenter, Julian Treasure on the effect of sound on our lives

It’s always exciting when a magazine breaks the mould. Fantastic Man did it three years ago when designer Jop van Bennekom and journalist Gert Jonkers set out to reinvent ‘the gentleman’s style journal’. The title’s minimalist design and fresh take on fashion photography – a knowing, arch style – had an immediate effect on the rest of the men’s magazine market.

Its sister publication, the recently launched The Gentlewoman, looks set to have the same impact.

Ok, it shares the format of most other women’s magazines, but here the similarities end. The cover has a black and white portrait of Phoebe Philo (Creative Director at Céline) framed within a ‘nude’ colour background; the masthead is all lowercase Futura (expect another revival of this 20’s font shortly) and the paper has a highly tactile mottled texture. And, bar furniture and one discreet coverline, that’s it.

Inside, the design style is deceptively simple – understated, elegant, open, orderly and effortlessly authoritative. Colour is used sparingly – it’s largely black and white, but with the odd dash of block colour to mark out key stories and the three editorial sections. Imagery is challenging and used in challenging ways: tall and small models with heads cropped star in one of the main fashion stories; a series of abstract marine shots introduce a feature on ocean swimmer Lynne Cox; six pages of the backs of heads hold together a feature on ‘up-dos’… The text paper is gloss – conventional, maybe, but it contrasts nicely with the cover and an uncoated reference section in the centre.

The magazine’s editor in chief, Penny Martin, says the magazine is ‘about modernity and women that are just fantastic.’ It ditches celebrity for ‘women who live extraordinary lives’. What a breath of fresh air.

From its cover style to editorial platform, The Gentlewoman provides a stark contrast to any other women’s title. It’s dared to be different and deserves to succeed.

There are a few questions that are notoriously difficult to answer. “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” obviously tops the list of puzzlers, but it’s closely followed by that age-old conundrum, “How do you illustrate a subject like outcome-based commissioning?”

We produce Ethos magazine on behalf of services company Serco; it’s designed to further the debate on the future of public and private service. In the most recent issue, the FT’s Alex Barker wrote an article on outcome-based commissioning (OBC), which is essentially where the government pays for results (outcomes) in public services, rather than prescribes the process. This idea could apply to anything from welfare to work schemes and street cleaning contracts to leisure centres and healthcare.

Our art director, Ian Dutnall, asked a fantastic illustrator called Gavin Potenza to come up with a striking and creative visual to accompany the article. The resulting illustration borrows from the world of information graphics, but avoids getting too flashy or obscure. We like it because we think it successfully and subtly depicts a tricky concept. It gets across the connection between the UK Parliament and its goals, and uses fluid lines to imply the freedom of innovation that OBC encourages.

To read the article, go to www.ethosjournal.com, and for more of Gavin’s great ideas, check out his website: www.gavinpotenza.com

I, along with 250 teenagers, have downed the last of the fruit punch. Outside there’s an army of estate cars with irritated parents waiting for the party to end. Inside, I have at last summoned enough courage to prise myself off the wall and shuffle onto the dancefloor where, to the sounds of René and Renate’s ‘Save Your Love’, I manage to score my first kiss. Blimey!

Sadly, Melissa (how could I forget) and I never formed a relationship. No matter how much pocket money I expended on red stationery and silver pens, my billets-doux were never returned. It was an early lesson in relationships.

Twenty-seven years on, I’m struck by the way in which relationships in all walks of life – particularly how they start and are maintained – have changed. It’s not just that everyone’s using social media to filter, flirt and form relationships; it’s that communication itself has changed. Relationships start via email, SMS or IM (rather than letters or school discos). But, while the ways in which we build relationships have broadened, there are still some enduring truths to maintaining them. Truths built on principles of mutual attraction, respect and trust – the key word being mutual.

Brand relationships follow very similar rules to personal relationships. We talk about ‘promiscuous consumers’, ‘loyalty’ and ‘affinity’. But at the heart of it all, a relationship is about mutuality – you give and take in (broadly) equal measure.

I hear you already. What on earth has this got to do with customer publishing? Well, publishing agencies are unique in understanding mutuality – the need to give and take. We all know it’s no longer acceptable (or profitable) to interrupt and bombard a customer. The consumer holds much of the power once held by brands. Publishing agencies understood this long before it was either fashionable or a reality.

When your brand relationship with customers is malfunctioning, it’s worth taking time out to consider why. Counsellors at Relate are trained to spot the signs of malfunctioning in personal relationships. Brands can apply similar principles to make sure problems don’t emerge in their relationships with customers. Here are seven guiding principles:

• Communication: magazines are wonderfully habit-forming. They build anticipation and, if produced well and published frequently, become part of a customer’s life.

• Honesty: it’s a given. No brand survives without a core truth, without authenticity. Dasani, New Coke, smokeless cigarettes anyone?

• Excitement: not to be confused with interruption. A brand campaign overawes through repetition; a great customer publication delivers excitement through  compelling stories and imagery. As for solus messages repeated ad infinitum, that’s just nagging.

• Relevance: focus on what people actually want to read, rather than what a brand wants to say. It’s the difference between having a conversation and shouting. More relevance equals more use equals greater loyalty.

• Support: give customers real value over and above the purchase, something that enhances the brand experience rather than bluntly going for the upsell or cross-sell.

• Time: customer magazines are unique in delivering (on average) 25 minutes of reader engagement. 25 minutes! Compare that to the average 30-second TV spot; to the time it takes to highlight and delete a spam email; to the distance from your doormat to the bin for the average piece of DM.

• Diversify: publishing agencies no longer deliver through a single channel (ie. magazines). We’ve long understood and adapted to digital and social media trends. Customers respond to different media in different ways at different times.

So there we have it. Seven simple rules to building a successful relationship – all of which are inherent in any effective customer publication. Which is why publishing agencies are uniquely placed to build, sustain and deepen the relationship between a brand and its customers. We understand what it takes to establish a rapport, to build trust and to deliver content that people actually want to read… and will respond to positively.

If only I’d known that at the NSPCC disco in 1982.